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A very nice surprise from Sony Ericsson. Even though Android does not have full and official support for Arabic until Android 4.0, their handsets do have very good Arabic support by default, even handsets sold in the USA and Canada.

Arabic in Sony Ericsson Xperia Android phone

If you have Android 2.1 or 2.3 and updated it to the latest update from your carrier, then you do have Arabic support. To check if it works, then just visit BBC Arabic and see if Arabic shows correctly and the letters are connected.

Enabling Arabic keyboard

To enable Arabic typing, you need to press Menu, then select "Language and Keyboard", then under "Keyboard settings" select "Default input", then select "Writing Languages", and check "Arabic". You will then see a language switching icon on your keyboard (the "globe" symbol).

Not only does Arabic work well, the font looks much better than what is in CyanogenMod for example.

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Update 2011-09-02

For the Xperia X10, when upgrading the software using Sony's PC Companion, you will get full Arabic support on the phone, with a beautiful font, and no glitches. The only drawback is the phone is unrooted, and therefore you lose functionality of apps that require root (e.g. Titanium Backup, ShootMe), and have the bloated apps that autostart (Timescape, Moxier Mail, ...etc.)

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Experimenting with the CyanogenMOD custom ROM on an HTC T-Mobile G1 Android phone, I frequently encounter that the camera would get a "force close" error. After the application exists, the camera app would not start again, unless you reboot.

Since this takes some time to do, and is inconvenient, I found another way to reset the camera without rebooting.

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So, over the past few days, I had an interesting issue with Android 2.1 (Eclair) on a Motorola Milestone.

Suddenly, it decided to stop syncing emails with Gmail. At the same time, syncing the calendar worked fine.

I tried solving this using by selecting another label, and then went back to the Inbox and it seemed to work, but in fact, it did not. It would show the correct number of unread messages, but the actual unread messages will be from an old sync. Very confusing.

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An apparently useful application for Android is Instant Heart Rate, which can be installed from the Android Market.

What it does is measure your heart rate using the built-in camera of the phone.

On my Motorola Milestone, there was a serious flaw though. Once you use the Instant Heart Rate app, the camera's brightness will be totally off: all your pictures will be severely overexposed (all white).